Reforestation practices have involved producing growing stock in specially prepared beds, and using this growing stock to replenish forests or the like. At or near the dormant season for the growing stock, it is removed from the beds and cut into whips, that is, pieces four to eight feet long and about one-half to three-fourth inches in diameter. The whips are stored in a controlled environment. The whips are then cut into sticks. A stick is a piece six to ten inches long and has at least one viable bud on it near one end. The bud is preferably less than one-third the length of the stick from one end of that stick. As the whips are being cut into sticks, the sticks are formed into bundles of about one hundred sticks with the buds all oriented at the same end of the bundle. The bundles are tied and wrapped in a plastic bag and kept in a storeroom having a proper environment. The sticks are stored until the proper planting season, then removed for planting.
The sticks must be kept moist during storage and while they are being transported to a planting site and up until they are actually placed in the soil. If the sticks are permitted to dry out and then placed in dry soil, they will have little chance of surviving and regenerating. It is also important to keep the sticks in an antiseptic environment during storage, during all this time.
In forestry practices, the sticks are planted on pre-selected spacings which has been accomplished by individual spot planting done by a forester, or the like.
While there have been a large number of reasons for such manual labor in spot planting, many attempts have been made to mechanize spot planting methods with a view to increasing the acreage which may be planted within a particular time interval while decreasing the physical labor involved. To the extent that mechanized methods and apparatus have been developed heretofore, such methods and apparatus are dangerous, of limited usefulness, or require special handling such as transferring the cutting by hand from a storage container to an insertion device which thereby reintroduces the manual labor aspects back into the planting process. The handler must make sure each stick is inserted into a planting machine at the proper orientation and position. The sticks must be held in the aforementioned storage bag to maintain them as moist as possible prior to planting, so the planter has to manipulate the sticks within the bag or during removal to make sure they remain moist but are properly oriented and positioned at insertion into the planting machine. The sticks must be removed one-by-one and placed in the planting machine. This manual operation is quite tedious and may inhibit overall operation. This manual operation becomes more disadvantageous as more planters are used. For example, if one tractor pulls four planting machines, four handlers are required. If there are four tractors, there are sixteen handlers required. In some cases, there can be as many as eighteen planting machines behind each tractor. As is evident, the sheer number of laborers is a major drawback of the prior devices. Still further, merely keeping the sticks in the storage sack does not keep them adequately moistened and protected while they are awaiting planting. Therefore, the handler must keep the remaining sticks in the bag while he is inserting other sticks into the planting machine one-by-one. It is quite awkward to accomplish this task. As a consequence, the acceptance of mechanized planting has been inhibited.
There is therefore a need to provide a means for fully automating the transfer of sticks from a storage container to insertion into the soil whereby the planting operation can be fully automated.